Pollard and Demjanjuk in the Jewish Mind
Morrison, Micah
Micah Morrison POLLARD AND DEMJANJUK IN THE JEWISH MIND The day the sky fell on U.S.-Israeli relations. Milan Kundera called Israel "the true heart of Europe, a heart strangely located outside...
...This abstraction of the Holocaust, and all that is subsequent to the Holocaust in the different histories of the two Jewish communities in the last forty years, marks off a certain distance between Israeli and American Jews...
...Polls indicate that ultra-Orthodox Jews (who often have the swing vote in parliament) get a high disapproval rating, while simply Orthodox Jews are highly regarded and—tellingly, for American Jewish leaders—trends in conservative and Reform Judaism are mostly met with indifference...
...Safire closed his second March column on Mr...
...Avineri "missed this basic reality of American Jewish life...
...Demjanjuk is on trial for his life in Jerusalem...
...Demjanjuk has not resonated as widely as that of Mr...
...For American Jews—now Jewish Americans—the American dream has come true...
...Demjanjuk is charged with taking part in the systematic murder of 850,000 human beings...
...Rabbi Neusner spelled out a position that many American Jews appear to share to various degrees, but are reluctant to acknowledge...
...The trial became "nothing less than an obsession for many Israelis," reported the New York Times, became "the background noise of Israeli society...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987to the country: bus drivers tuned in...
...Pollard received his life sentence and a tearful Anne Pollard appeared on Israeli TV declaring her love for the Jewish state and her confusion at being abandoned by Israel...
...Pollard has merely, by comparison, betrayed his country...
...Pollard's handlers, Air Force Colonel Aviam Sella, just as Mr...
...Demjanjuk's most prominent defender, echoed these concerns in the New York Times, adding that it was "just not credible" that the family man from Cleveland could have done all those horrible things as a twenty-twoyear-old youth...
...Inescapably alive, the Holocaust conditions Israelis' view of their nation, lending poignancy and paranoia to their lives...
...This may be bad news for Israel and for U.S.-Israeli relations, in the long run...
...After four decades, can the memory of the witnesses be relied on...
...Outside the court, lines formed in the Jerusalem dawn...
...It is a country that in the nearly forty years since its War of Independence has fought four major wars (not counting the sputtering War of Attrition and the endless war against terror), and in each war there were strong elements of public opinion that felt Israel's Western allies either had not fully stood behind them or had hesitated at critical moments—not the sort of actions that allow a sense of security to flourish...
...Israeli scholarship in Judaic studies, writes Rabbi Neusner, is "just a lot of dull-witted fact-mongering by third-rate academic politicians...
...citizenship and deportation, and John Demjanjuk now shows little emotion as the prosecution attempts to prove that he is the concentration camp guard known as Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Terrible...
...In response, noted New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Thomas Friedman—first off the line with the new development in a March 10 dispatcha certain anti-American sentiment" was brewing in Israel...
...his wife received a five-year sentence for related activities...
...Pollard hasmerely, by comparison, betrayed his country...
...Avineri's thesis, ridiculed by most American Jews, is that the anxiety about being seen by non-Jewish Americans as not truly American is deep in your soul, and it is in the soul—and not in external circumstances—that Galut [Exile, Diaspora] resides...
...Demjanjuk is charged with taking part in the systematic murder of 850,000 human beings...
...One would expect, he noted, that in a free society no guilt by association would be presumed —that only Mr...
...The Iranians appear as a kind of strange unshaved force, ensnaring Presidents, committing acts of "Arab" terrorism, and generally behaving in one hell of an annoying manner...
...Pollard's actions...
...As one Jewish American activist put it, "Those idiots in Jerusalem just shrugged it off...
...EI or Israel, the Holocaust is inescapablyy alive...
...Yet when he heard "American Jews talking about being accused of 'dual loyalty," Mr...
...Pollard, and for many American Jews, it seems that the idea of Israel has supplanted the reality...
...On issues burning inside the Beltway—arms sales to Iran and dealings with the contras—Israelis are fairly evenly divided among those who support these projects, those who oppose them, and those who don't give a hoot...
...Milan Kundera called Israel "the true heart of Europe, a heart strangely located outside the body...
...Pollard's handlers were famous for their actions in defense of the state...
...Furthermore, it is a democracy divided...
...Yet for Americans—and that means American Jews, that perhaps being part of the price for becoming "more American" and "less Jewish"---the Holocaust seems a pretty bloodless thing...
...It is frantically remembered...
...Greed and delusion in the end seem to be what motivated Mr...
...The two major political blocs are allied in government because neither could form a parliamentary majority alone...
...Many people "have a feeling of having been taken for a ride," the Washington Post commented in an editorial, "and that feeling could take forms the Israelis can't possibly want to set They need to do something about it —and fast...
...Pollard had been there exactly once, for a few weeks, as a teenager...
...But when the going gets tough, then the test arrives of being accepted, of really being equal, of really being proud and not having to look over your shoulder...
...From Israel's point of view, this is a blow struck at the heart of the Zionist imperative of aliyah (immigration), a subject to which for the most part American Jewry has lent lip service and dollars, but little more...
...Forlet us face it," commented one Jewish American writer examining the controversy over President Reagan's trip to Bitburg cemetery in Germany, "the word 'Holocaust,' even for Jews, induces by now a mostly dead sensation...
...But as what...
...Demjanjuk has been charged is far greater than that of the crimes Mr...
...Public figures worried about a new generation grown apathetic and cynical...
...Israel, too, is hardly free from the sort of paranoia that grows from the soil of Gaut...
...Back in his college days, Mr...
...Somebody is missing something, but just exactly what is being missed is hard to sort out...
...National Review took liberal columnist Richard Cohen to task for prejudging the outcome of the trial in his Washington Post column by citing Mr...
...and Israel...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987 ments of it first surfaced in the Times, and this itself "reveals a lot of insecurity on our part...
...All that changed when Mr...
...Pollard's Zionism by Israeli spymasters blind to the immorality of inducement to treason and the consequences of getting caught...
...Pollard by calling for Israeli "action": the Pollard affair was "Israel's greatest peacetime challenge" and Israel's leaders should "put patriotism first" and "resign...
...noted that the Avineri article had been the subject of much discussion and condemnation from the day fragMr...
...crimes against humanity...
...What American Jews are not wholly secure in—and what Israeli Jews are not wholly secure in—is their relationship to each other...
...You too have to be emancipated from Galut and alienation...
...But it is there, it is real, it is palpable in the fabric of life...
...As for the country he said he cared so much about, Israel, Mr...
...secrets...
...rom the beginning, Israeli reaction .1' to the Pollard affair was both apologetic and defensive...
...It is neither an excuse for governmental irresponsibility nor a towering monolith that casts a black shadow over what in the final analysis is a remarkably happy Mediterranean country...
...Rabbi Neusner's shrill preening in the pages of a national newspaper indicates a new low level in mutual misunderstanding...
...The "serious stupidity" of running Mr...
...It probably means more periods of misunderstandings and troubled relations between American Jews and Jerusalem, though wars between the Jews are nothing new...
...He concludes: "For American Jews—now Jewish Americans—the American dream has come true...
...Less and less of the life of American Jews is derived from Jewish history, experience, culture, and religion," wrote sociologist Nathan Glazer in the August 1985 issue of Commentary...
...Commenting on the Demjanjuk trial, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier wrote that it "is pointless, at this late date, to worry about an absence of awareness of the Holocaust...
...Perhaps this is "less Jewish" or maybe it is a different form of Jewishness, changing as Judaism has always changed—retaining elemental beliefs but slipping into new costumes as the centuries passed...
...Israel's top leadership, as of this writing, has not followed Mr...
...Sympathy for the Pollards, before their sentencing, did not run deep...
...Demjanjuk is Ivan...
...At present, Mr...
...Most of us are offended first as Americans at the spectacle of having our foreign aid dollars used to buy U.S...
...For Mr...
...O ne cannot, of course, excuse all of Israel's actions because of the Holocaust...
...Although some Israelis "tell American Jews that America, like the fleshpots of Egypt, is no place for a Jew—we're all going to die in the gas chambers, singing Christmas carols' Rabbi Neusner thinks (and it is a safe bet that in this he is echoing the thinking of the vast majority of American Jewry) that "the Jews have built a Jewish life in America that can last...
...Condemnation came swift and hard—and mostly from American Jews...
...Pollard...
...In the following weeks, the Avineri article would be the subject of widespread and often bitter comment...
...At just about the same time, the Tower Commission released its report, parts of which detailed deep Israeli involvement in the transfer of arms to Iran and money to contra-connected bank accounts...
...When American Jews condemn the Pollard affair so loudly, it is this accomplishment that they see threatened...
...And when the going got tough your leaders reacted like trembling Israelites in the shred, not like the proud and mighty citizens of a free democratic society...
...Successful and self-assured, for them Israel and Judaism appear to have become more abstract, something to honor at holidays, births, and funerals...
...Everybody spies on everybody else—what's the big deal...
...On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that two millennia of Dispersion can be drained from the Jewish soul in two centuries of political freedom in North America...
...An official in one of the leading Jewish organizations in the U.S...
...and Israel...
...Bald, with a thick strong neck and powerful hands, with cool eyes and a detached, almost arrogant manner, he bears much too close a resemblance to a Nazi thug, Hollywood version...
...An underlying sense of geographic isolation appears to bolster American thinking in this regard...
...When he finally did make contact with Israeli intelligence, Zionism was made painless by payments of tens of thousands of dollars, first-class trips to Europe, and expensive gifts...
...complicity in the murder of 850,000 Jews in the death camp Treblinka...
...Pollard hang together in the Jewish mind, troubling reminders of old hatreds and old conflicts...
...Wieseltier's view, the trial may demonstrate that Nazi evil was all too human, and not centrally a case of the Eichmannesque impersonality of a machine built to serve Hitler's modern industrial state...
...Even Israel's firmest friends in America gagged on that one...
...But you too need to be freed from Galut, from the inner bond, from what [the early Zionist writer] Ahad Ha'am called "servitude within freedom...
...What seems important here, though, is not so much who apprehends what "basic reality," but that each Jewish community has become so anchored in its own separate national-cultural ethos that in a time of crisis the lines of communication between the two communities quickly became fouled and the bridges were bombed in hasty withdrawal...
...In the United States, the case of Mr...
...Today, American Jewish leaders, by their protestations of over-zealous loyalty to the United States at a moment when nobody is really questioning it, are saying that America in the long run is no different from France or Germany...
...We are betrayed again by the easy exploitation of Mr...
...Pat Buchanan, Mr...
...It's time to say that America is a better place to be a Jew than Jerusalem...
...How does the Holocaust figure in American life...
...Demjanjuk's old ID card, was provided by the Soviet Union...
...I wonder how many Israelis think the Zionist one has come true, too...
...The immediate subject is a Ukrainian-born former American, a man once sympathetically described by a friend as a "peasant with a third-grade education, a nobody...
...Jewry...
...Jewish Americans feel doubly betrayed," wrote New York Times columnist William Safire in one of three March columns on the Pollard affair...
...The key question in the trial is one of identity...
...yet nor should one ignore the centrality of the Holocaust—and subsequent Israeli history—in the mental framework of the nation...
...This is once more than the majority of American Jews, who have never visited the Jewish state...
...Demjanjuk...
...Can the Soviets be trusted, or are they fishing in troubled waters, using a forged card to hang Mr...
...American Jewry is only now beginning to react to the case of Jonathan Jay Pollard," wrote the Jewish Week in March...
...The Pollard affair also opened the way for other attacks on Israel, some predictable, some not...
...Pollard would be held responsible for Mr...
...Israel, in the American view...
...was not being properly repentant...
...Demjanjuk's trial and Mr...
...Pollard's sentencing—may indicate approaching divergences in the heretofore largely parallel paths of Israel and American Jewry...
...In other words, Why are they picking on us...
...It is directed both at American Jews and at the American government, in response to their pressures on Israel, to at least show contrition for the spying operation by punishing Israeli officials involved...
...Demjanjuk is 6 feet 1? In the presence of the three somber black-robed judges—in the presence, many feel, of history—thesurvivors of Treblinka seem to have no doubt that Mr...
...Why, more "Israelis live in the U.S...
...Demjanjuk's situation 1 was largely relegated to the wings in the U.S., the case of Mr...
...Demjanjuk and Mr...
...Galut is ambivalence, alienation, homelessness...
...Satire's prescription for patriotism...
...S oon, the Demjanjuk trial was competing for space in the Israeli media with fresh developments in the Pollard spy case and the Iran-contra affair...
...the ambivalence of American Jews to Zionism's call for Jews to immigrate to Israel is another...
...It is immaterial as far as Israel is concerned which dictatorship rules Nicaragua," wrote Ma'ariv's Yosef Harish in a piece on Jerusalem's role in the diversion of money to the contras...
...One Jewish American intellectual called the piece "lunatic...
...Avineri published the piece because he was looking for a job in the hardline Shamir administration...
...Israelis were "at a stage beyond catharsis and uneager to look again into the pits of hell," noted a local reporter on the morning of the trial's opening session...
...than in Jerusalem," and "Israeli art and creative life have made only a slight impact on American Jews...
...Is the retired automobile worker from Cleveland actually Ivan the Terrible...
...He had heard all about the Holocaust and Israel and Zionism, but somewhere along the line all that got twisted up into something cheap and hollow...
...It is, also, a country that each year somberly marks a "Holocaust Day...
...Demjanjuk's "larger historical function," thus throwing scruples about civil liberties to the winds...
...The charges are not nobody charges: crimes against the Jewish people...
...It figures through television movies, memorial projects, and the beatific presence of the apparently ubiquitous Elie Wiesel...
...If there ever was a Promised Land we Jewish Americans are living in it...
...Yet there may be a sense in which the two men embrace in the Jewish mind—in the Israeli mind, and in a similar but not identical way, in the American Jewish mind...
...It was a matter of national security...
...The Holocaust is famous...
...Avineri: American Jews are not wholly secure in their identity and in their country...
...But Gehenna itself is an invention of the Hebrews, born in the valleys around ancient Jerusalem, and by the end of the first day no seat in the courtroom was empty...
...Pollard went to jail for...
...fp hough Mr...
...More and more of it is derived from the current and existing realities of American culture, American politics, and the general American religion...
...Pollard, his professions of Zionistic love of Israel notwithstanding...
...How, one might ask, can a person claim deep kinship with a land he has never seen...
...What about reports that Ivan was killed in a Treblinka revolt in 1943...
...Arabs and Jews are often in conflict, as are religious and secular Jews...
...In the U.S., Jonathan Pollard, who is Jewish and a self-proclaimed Zionist, was sentenced to life in prison for using his post as a Navy intelligence analyst to commit repeated acts of espionage on behalf of Israel...
...A decade of federal investigations and court battles recently ended with the revocation of his U.S...
...What art could not accomplish, television did...
...It is very easy to clamor at elegant wine and cheese parties for the freedom of Soviet Jews...
...Israel's leaders then compounded their blunders in the affair by promoting one of Mr...
...Pollard used to brag about the jobs he did for various intelligence services of the world...
...the magazine also expressed concern about Soviet intentions in providing evidence against Mr...
...This is just a loftier version of Israeli condescension that is responsible for Israel's many recent mistakes...
...By contrast, a majority of Americans seem to be of the opinion that arms sales to Iran and aiding the contras are very bad ideas...
...Demjanjuk represents a generation that is passing from the scene and, rightly or wrongly, that generation has fastened on him to try once again to show that justice has a long arm, and to try to make people remember...
...The abandonment of a Jew in trouble struck a chord...
...Pollard was acknowledged, though the general tone of public opinion before his sentencingwas better expressed by an editorial in one of the country's largest newspapers, Yediot Aharanot: "Circles identified with the American Justice Department are using the Pollard affair to wage a campaign against Israel...
...The public," noted the newspaper Ma'ariv, "feels ill at ease about the way the Pollards were left in the lurch...
...While the Israeli public was uneasy about the treatment of the Pollards and spontaneously began to collect money to help with the lawyers' bills, American and Israeli officials and intellectuals were lurching deeper into a morass of conflicting messages and mixed emotions...
...It is a country that intensely tracks incidents of anti-Semitism, or intimations of anti-Semitism, throughout the world: two recent incidents much mulled over in the Israeli press were the Nation's publication of an ugly tract by Gore Vidal and the election of Kurt Waldheim to the presidency of Austria...
...The early reactions range from horror that Israel could have done such a dastardly deed to fear that the rest of us will be viewed as Zionist spies...
...Pollard, to keep a nearby war burning by selling arms, and to help its great and generous ally with sticky deals like the contras...
...The American Jewish reluctance to move to Israel has tended to reinforce an Israeli view of Americans as generous and well-meaning, but spoiled and naive...
...The responses—to, particularly, Mr...
...A rumor circulated that Mr...
...And why does the Soviet-supplied card give Ivan's height as 5 feet 9, when Mr...
...When the going is good—when being Jewish and supporting Israel go together with waving the American flag—who would be as stupid as not to wish to have the best of both worlds...
...Garment concludes that somehow Mr...
...Pollard's sentencing, the General Federation of Labor's newspaper, Davar, echoed the general editorial comment on the eve of Holocaust Day: "The reality of the sovereign state of Israel and the extensive influence of the American Jewish community today shouldn't make us forget the terrible weakness of the Jewish people" during the Holocaust...
...On arms sales to Iran, Ze'ev Schiff, the noted military analyst for Ha'aretz, wrote that it "is in Israel's interest that the Iran-Iraq war continue endlessly, on a small fire, without either of the sides—who define themselves as Israel's enemies—achieving a real victory...
...Somebody would cut a deal, the Pollards would spend a few years in jail at worst, and that would be that...
...In Mr...
...Is it a place of the mind, a source of pride, a fortress to escape to "just in case...
...It reinforces a tendency to put the ghosts of the past on trial, to accept the risky gifts offered by a walk-in spy such as Mr...
...That is a problem that must now trouble the custodians of memory...
...The issues surrounding both men touch on Jewish fears, Jewish nightmares, and they have evoked different responses from Jews in the U.S...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987 21...
...Jerusalem had continued to maintain the fiction that the Pollards' spying was an unsanctioned "rogue operation...
...Discussions in Israel tend at times to take on a certain grim pragmatism that Americans might find distasteful...
...perhaps he came to believe his own lies...
...relations and my concern for relations between the two countries and for relations with U.S...
...and for all its achievements and promise, America, it now appears, may not be your Promised Land...
...Pollard represents a younger generation...
...Some Jewish intellectuals see evidence of a general dying out of the communal and cultural bonds of American Jewish life...
...Avineri wrote,evidences "a degree of nervousness, insecurity and even cringing on the part of the American Jewish community which runs counter to the conventional wisdom of American Jewry feeling free, secure and unmolested in an open and pluralistic society...
...Pollard received his life sentence...
...Mrs...
...Most Americans seem to be-lieve the idea of Communism spreading north from Nicaragua is about as likely as the moon turning pink...
...Friedman cited a Jerusalem Post article by the liberal political theorist Shlomo Avineri...
...At first, it was thought in Israel that the trial would attract little attention...
...In a Jerusalem courtroom—in the heart of the heart of the strange country—Israelis are digging again in the graveyard of unrestful obsession...
...The Justice Department apparently doesn't know that which is known to the CIA, the State Department and the White House: the scope of past, present, and possibly future American spy activities in Israel...
...The anti-Semitic canard of dual loyalty is one aspect...
...Of course, the magnitude of the crimes with which Mr...
...Writing on the op-ed page of the Times, Suzanne Garment noted that for forty years American Jews have helped build a "stable, supportive [U.S.-Israel] relationship...
...One of these consequences is the encouragement of anti-Semites who charge that Jews everywhere are at best afflicted with dual loyalty and at worst are agents of a vast fifth column...
...Despite the revolutionary upheaval which has since taken place in Israel and the lands of the Diaspora, the Jewish people is still facing dangers, both from the hostile anti-Zionist-Moslem-Communist-Radical front, and from the renewed display of classic anti-Semitism...
...American Jewish reaction to the Pollard case, Mr...
...I would recognize him," said one, "if they dug him out of the grave...
...Demjanjuk, undermine the strongly anti-Communist American-Ukrainian community, and cow Ukrainian nationalists back in the USSR...
...Here, then, is another aspect of the affair that cuts deep at central concerns in the relationship of the Jewish communities in the U.S...
...On March 29, Colonel Sella resigned from his new job as commander of the Tel Nof Air Force Base, citing "the deterioration in Israeli-U.S...
...Avineri quite correctly asked, "Who, among non-Jews, has accused you of that...
...I wonder how many Israelis think the Zionist one has come true, too...
...For those turned away from the court, the proceedings went live to television sets in a nearby hall, and went live by radio Micah Morrison, former Israel correspondent of The American Spectator is deputy director of the Committee for the Free World and editor of its monthly publication, Contentions...
...One, whether innocent or guilty, is a lingering player in the twentieth century's greatest story of evil unbound...
...television coverage of the Demjanjuk trial was dutiful, but 19 it could not be said that the proceedings gripped the nation...
...Public opinion polls continue to show deep divisions about what to do with the West Bank...
...Last year, well before the crisis broke over Mr...
...Preposterous and a little pernicious," responded the New Republic...
...Demjanjuk denies it...
...children discussed the case in class...
...New blood in anti-Semitism via the old charge of dual loyalty—a serious consequence indeed, and one that appeared to be at the center of Jewish concerns over the Pollard affair...
...Israel is "a great place to visit"--"wonderful hotels, great scenery, first-rate tours" and oh those lovely Jerusalem sabbaths and "pilgrim festivals in Galilee"!—but forget about living there...
...American Jews seem different...
...Pollard stepped, for some weeks, to the center of the American media stage...
...A third aspect is the issue bluntly raised by Mr...
...war crimes...
...A further complication: a central piece of evidence, purportedly Mr...
...One unpredictable attack—a significant one, from an Israeli perspective—came from Conservative Rabbi Jacob Neusner in the Washington Post...
...Perhaps that is what Kundera meant when he called Israel "the true heart of Europe," the cosmopolitan Jewish heart: torn from the body by Nazi Germany and, surviving, transplanted by the Zionist movement—the way prepared long before Hitler—in an ancient land that nourished European civilization...
...Clearly, American Jewish leaders did not (and do not) act "like trembling Israelites in the slued" when the going got tough...
Vol. 20 • June 1987 • No. 6
